Slashdot Mirror
Cuba: US Using New Weapon Against Us -- Spam
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about accusations from Cuban officials about a spamming campaign against the country by the U.S.. "Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam. 'It's overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,' said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA. At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba's creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages. The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature. Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over about five hours."
300,000 in five hours? God forbid!
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
This is the level of brain-dead scheme that the CIA has pulled many times in the past, but it's just as likely that they're just getting overwhelmed by one incompetent spammer with a fat pipe...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay. Since the USSR collapsed its been pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things other than a source of refugees and comedy revolutionaries in green slacks with silly beards.
It would take care of Fidel's beard once and for all.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
We had all kinds of crazy ideas for killing Castro. 10 Ways the CIA tried to kill Castro
The crazy thing is that with what we've learnt about the US the past years, and the governments total disregard for anything besides their own power, I'm not really sure if these claims are as outlandish as they sound.
I think we've come a good way when we no longer think that the claims of the crazy are untrue just because they sound crazy.
And yes, the volumes given are so tiny that it could very well be something that some agency discovered on their TODO list under the "do when you've got a minute" section.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
i would disconnect the nation from the rest of the world and turn the nation's internet connection in to a nationwide Local Area Network, so the people of my nation can communicate with each other by the various methods (audio, video, text) and have a few world wide connected computers that filter out all the spam and malware, and once checked it can be circulated on the national LAN.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Didn't we do something similar to the Taliban involving telemarketers after 9/11?
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
my dad was Cuban...came over in '59 when Castro came to power, and made a really good life for himself.
funny thing is...he loved spam...said it was really popular over there.
go figure.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
"bizarre plots over the years"...Yes, the CIA has tried many stupid ideas to get the "radical leader"...exploding cigars, poison diving suits given as a gift, cancer virus, to name a few. Can't we all just get along, smoke wonderful cigars, drink rum and lay on the beach?
I don't know what is more worrisome: that the CIA actually tried these things - or that each one failed.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
You seem to have a very simple model of the world. Simple, and wrong.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Plots... the funniest of which was the powder-in-the-shoes-to-make-the-beard-fall-out. Exploding conch shells were in the works, too, I suppose for if the poison diving suit didn't work.
As far as the pleasures, don't forget cruising around in the convertible '59 Cadillac.
And yet, the bureaucrats and SJWs will scratch their heads in wonder at why average Americans have such a cavalier attitude towards bullying.
I believe the US sends about 4% of the world's volume of spam, depending on how you measure it. So um...no.
American foreign policy has been, and continues to exist, on autopilot. the kind of 'hearts-and-minds' democracy predates the carter administration and was originally pushed as part of a diet of secret military coups, sponsored terrorist campaigns, and random acts of embargo designed to pressure communist and socialist governments in latin america toward democracy. the people we would install were usually brutally dictatorial.
the problem is Cuba has watched us do this for quite some time, and become seriously good at identifying and stamping out any of our attempts to topple leadership or foster civil unrest. The only reason we were scared of castro when he had nuclear arms wasnt because he was a madman, but because our shenannigans could now be met with scorched earth instead of populism and pocket resistance.
we are and continue to be on autopilot because the people who run our government, the plutocracy behind the politicians, is utterly mortified at the idea of alternative theories of government that distribute wealth. the US government in turn does what it can now as a fading superpower to appease its cloistered elite, which is apparently so pointless as to involve irritating SMS traffic.
what cuba could do in turn if it seriously wanted to agitate america, and it does not, is liberate the Guantanamo Bay detention center and nationalize its prisoners.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Still with that? Obviously big fishes are pocketing tons of taxpayers money with this scam.....and those guys will never cut the flow, on both sides of the story. Reality is, no govt really cares about the people.
There is a meaningful and useful difference between a painting of a clock and a clock that runs 5 minutes fast.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It's that Nigerian prince, I tell ya!
Table-ized A.I.